Introducing Transaction Relay: Pay For Ethereum Contracts and Transactions With Any EIP20 Token

A great step towards making Ethereum compatible with other cryptocurrency projects was made yesterday, enter Transaction Relay, an innovative solution to pay for Ethereum Dapps and transactions using other Ethereum Tokens.

When Ethereum launched its creators argued that the project was aimed to eventually work closely with other cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin. Aligned with this idea, BTC Relay launched some time ago, this project allows Ethereum contracts to securely verify Bitcoin transactions without any intermediaries. But now, the developer Iuri Matias unveiled a working proof-of-concept of Transaction Relay, to allow users to pay for Ethereum transactions with other Ethereum Tokens (EIP 20 Compatible) like Digix.

TransactionRelay is a new mechanism to pay for transactions costs in the Ethereum network with any token in Ethereum. In TransactionRelay you have two types of users, the first one is the ‘Requester‘ which is the person who wants to issue a transaction and pay in some token. The second type of user is the ‘Relayer’, who picks up the transaction and is willing to deploy it in exchange for the tokens proposed.

The request is signed and broadcasted over Whisper, an Ethereum protocol to securely send and receive messages.

The possible applications of this technology are many, Iuri Matias theorized the following:

‘Pay-to-play’ used to be the only model possible in Ethereum, in this model the issuer of the transaction needs to be able to own ether to pay for the interaction, TransactionRelay enables 3rd parties to take in the fee cost by issuing tokens to registered addresses. This could be useful for applications where the developer doesn’t expect the user to own ether easily to pay for the transactions to interact with a specific Dapp or contract. It could also be used for controlled interactions e.g giving a user 10 free roulette spins in a Ethereum-based casino game.

TransactionRelay is in alpha stage, and the developer is encouraging other coders and programmers to fork and play with the project. Iuri Matias said to The Merkle that in the future, Bitcoin and BTCRelay could be used in conjunction with TransactionRelay:

In theory, you can represent other currencies with an ethereum token, for example, someone could create a centralized peg (very similar to what Rootstock is doing), and have a 1:1 Bitcoin token on Ethereum.

Iuri Matias is an Ethereum Dapp developer, he is the creator of Embark, a framework to easily create and deploy Ethereum Dapps. Matias has been a developer for 10 years.